Fill Your Cravings at the Circus of iPhones

Apple finally introduced us to the iPhone 5 today. Funny thing is, I felt like we’d already met. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that almost every piece of this phone already leaked out of Apple’s sieve-like supply chain in the last couple of months. Regardless, where I was once bemoaning the impossibility of choosing a smartphone in today’s market, I had to admit during the keynote today that it’s really just folly for me to put anything other than an iPhone in my pocket.

So…I’m sorry, Android world. Maybe I’ll come for a visit next time.

In the end, it wasn’t the choice of phone that was the hardest to make. It’s everything that comes after which is giving me pause. The thing is, it’s by no means certain that I’m actually getting an iPhone 5. No; as I’ve already detailed, I decided to be a dumbass this year and send my like-new iPhone 4S off in a box to Amazon in the hopes that they’d give me the $455 they claimed it was worth. In retrospect, I now know that this was dumb because of the pain I’ve already endured since making this foolhardy decision.

In the wake of my 4S’s departure, I’ve been using my original iPhone 2G for a week now, and it’s excruciating. The EDGE data network’s slowness don’t really bother me since I’m on Wi-Fi 99% of the time, but the overall slowness of the phone itself is the worst. That, and the fact that every time I turn around, a feature I’ve come to rely on is missing. iMessage. Video recording. Dropbox. Remote desktop. Even the ability to invert the colors on my screen for nighttime reading. None of it is here. I wouldn’t even have the ability to lock the screen rotation, were it not for the fact that I jailbroke this phone a long time ago and SBSettings at least gives me that.

But I could live with all of this — quite happily, even — if I had any idea of what to expect from here on out. With iPhone 5 preorders starting in the wee hours of Friday the 14th, I had hoped to get my 4S appraised by Amazon beforehand so that I could be sure that I’d actually be getting some money to offset the purchase of a new phone. Unfortunately, UPS jacked up my shipment and now it’s not even going to get to Amazon until Friday, meaning I likely won’t get an appraisal until next Tuesday or Wednesday. That leaves me in the tenuous position of either preordering an iPhone 5 and then having to return it if Amazon doesn’t pay, or waiting till I hear from Amazon and then sitting through the initial iPhone 5 backorder period until mid or even late October before my new phone gets here.

I especially hate uncertainty, so I’m pretty peeved about the way this whole thing has gone. And of course, it’s all my own fault: I could have just held onto my 4S for another year, got it unlocked by AT&T at the conclusion of my contract, and then bought a new phone in 2013. But no, I had to get greedy. So now I’m gonna pay — if not in dollars, then in distress.

The reasonable thing to do at this point is not push the envelope any further, and to simply preorder only my wife’s iPhone 5 this Friday. Because I’ll at least be able to get out of this old 2G and into her 3GS once her new phone gets here on the 21st, if I wind up having to wait until late October to get my own iPhone 5, at least it won’t be so painful. And that way, if Amazon returns my 4S to me because it didn’t appraise at “like new” condition, I’ll just put the 4S back in my pocket and have no further hassle. (Given how this cockamamie scheme has already gone for me, I can only imagine the potential mess of having to return an iPhone 5 and roll back my upgrade with AT&T.)

Anyway, it looks like I’m gonna have a late night ahead of me tomorrow. I detailed the whole iPhone 4S launch process on this blog last year, so I pretty much know what I’m in for: a couple hours of sleep if I’m lucky before the 2 a.m. kickoff, followed by a great big question mark of server overloads, malfunctions and misdirections, leading eventually to a successful sale at some undetermined point during the wee hours. Or I suppose I could get lucky, snag an order nearly right away and then shuffle comfortably back to bed. Who knows?

Although my own phone situation may be in turmoil, I know that my wife is going to be one happy camper on Friday the 21st. And seeing her joy and excitement will make this whole ordeal worth it.